Armchair Book Review: A Shepherd's Letter

 The best thing of Giertz's since Christ's Church is now available in English for the first time!

After first encountering Bo Giertz through Hammer of God, I quickly sought out anything else of his I could find. One of the first things was "Liturgy & Spiritual Awakening". It solidified my conviction that this guy was a gift for the church. I later read how L&SA was a portion of a larger work of Giertz's: Herdebrev. The work was done as a manifesto of sorts for his diocese upon his election to bishop in 1949. I had gotten a copy in Swedish some time ago, but I kept hearing rumblings that it was coming to English. Well, the wait is finally over with A Shepherd's Letter: The Faith Once and For All Delivered to the Evangelical Church, translated by Bror Erickson. Before getting into the work itself let's talk about the cover judgment:

As usual, 1517 delivers a fine quality matte cover. This book gets some props for other elements. Similar to how I really liked their cover for Luther's Galatians commentary, I really like the cover art for this one as well. The quill pen is simple yet communicative, and the stem turned into a Shepherd's crook is a great touch. While I'm not generally a fan of the golden color it really works with the blue font and white art. And it stands out nicely on my shelf. It is also a more pleasing shade than the slightly more mustard color for Year of Grace Vol 1. The font is a rather large size (especially compared to the readable but small font size of the New Testament Devotional Commentary Vol 1). There are a few helpful footnotes (though not as many as say in Faith Alone), and in general Erickson has done a fine job in translating. I will note there were a few spots in the book that were a little harder to read at first glance than is typical of Bror's translating, and I am unsure as to whether that was a result of translator or the material translated. Given Bror's history I would lean towards the latter, but there were a couple moments where I felt the reading was not as smooth as I am used to (your spoiling me Bror!). But one can hold up his portions that have also been translated by Nelson (the one who translated L&SA as well as Hammer and other works of Giertz's in the mid-twentieth century) and see the quality of work he does. One can also compare Nelson's translation of "Message of the Church in a Time of Crisis" with Erickson's here (more on that in a moment).

To the work itself, in short it has instantly vaulted to my top 3 works of Giertz's along with Christ's Church and Message of the Church in a Time of Crisis. I love Giertz's commentaries, novels, and sermons but as a reader of theology I gravitate towards his works that just give you his theology in a more straightforward (less artistic - be it narrative, sermon-craft, commentary, etc) way. And like those, you practically can find yourself being roused as you read it. The work reads with a sense of grandioseness. It was in reading this grandiose beginning that I started to feel like right away some of this was familiar. Giertz can be known for sharing similar phrases, illustrations, or points from time to time, this can be especially seen in some of his material on baptism theology. But this seemed overly familiar. So much so it made me open up Message of the Church in a Time of Crisis, a work prepared by Nelson in '53 in anticipation of Giertz's trip to the US. He included a series of essays and excerpts from Giertz, including the book's namesake, a piece entitled "Message of the Church in a Time of Crisis", this essay mirrors the first 21 pages of A Shepherd's Letter, from the chapter entitled "Crises and Sources of Strength", and the last three paragraphs (that appear after the section break) in that chapter appear as Nelson's openening to L&SA (the rest of the material to be found on p53-77 in Shepherd's Letter). When I mentioned to Bror I suspected this overlap between "Message of the Church" and Shepherd's Letter, he was not so sure precisely because of how Giertz can repeat. So I checked more thoroughly to confirm this. And I can say that every sentence of the first ten paragraphs in "Message" appear in Shepherd's Letter, at that point I started jumping paragraphs and could find the start of every paragraph in "Message" in Shepherd's Letter almost always as a paragraph start, though on a few occasions the paragraph break was not in common, but nothing in "Message" could not be found in A Shepherd's Letter. It is worth noting that there is a bit of material in Shepherd's Letter that does not appear in "Message" and it is noticeably almost always material specific to the Church of Sweden, which leads me to believe Nelson omitted it. 

This is significant, because I love Message of the Church as a whole. It is probably my favorite of all of Giertz's works in English. Right away, I find its opening essay is the grand opening for A Shepherd's Letter. This sets the tone for the work as a whole. The work is rousing and evangelical in nature. It is immensely quotable (as friends of mine on Facebook quickly found as I bombarded them over the days I read from it with quotes). This is Giertz at his best, and for my favorite theologian that is saying something! I cannot stress enough how good of a read this is.

Giertz's work is essentially divided into three main parts: The inheritance from the early church, the Reformation, and the Awakenings. Strangely Erickson places the last part as a subsection of the second, but in Herdebrev it is put into a separate chapter entirely and this clear sectioning can be seen in the end of his introduction on p22. Perhaps it is because of the noticeable difference in size from the third section to the other two and that it is the only one to not include subsections that leads to this decision. In his introduction Giertz states his intention in turning to lessons from these momentous moments in church history:

"So our working plan is this: to learn from the past to be able to meet tomorrow, to dive as deeply into the church's great river of life so that we are prepared to proclaim Christ's Word before new men and live his life in the manner that belongs to this new century in the church's history."

This work really gives us Giertz's core theological convictions. Giertz was never interested in forming new trends in theology but in faithfully adapting the message to the church today. This interest is part of his giftedness. He shows here his ability to find the heart and best of the past. This gives a lot of his work a timeless quality. Yet when you read him, there is something fresh in his work that makes it feel truly contextualized to his world (and to a somewhat lesser extent our own).

Giertz begins with the inheritance of early church with a subsection on the scriptures, and here there is both a lot of material of his you will find elsewhere packed together (see for example his essay "The Bible's View and the View of the Bible" in works like Then Fell the Lord's Fire and The New Testament Devotional Commentary Vol 1) and some unique ways in which he speaks of the Word and preaching. Here we see some of his helpfulness in homiletical construction, as he gives insight into more concrete ways of preaching the law. The chapter also includes the subsection "Liturgy & Spiritual Awakening" as well as sections on Dogma, the Lord's Supper, and the Pastoral Office. It was nice to have a work on the pastoral office that did not address the issue of women's ordination, since that was the major controversy of Giertz's day. I have in the past noted that it is prevalent enough in his works that it is hard to miss, and that does make it harder to get acceptance by him in the ELCA. This is a work that even while addressing the office specifically, does not go into that area where he and my church would be in clear disagreement. That makes this also perhaps the next work of his to really push towards opening up more ELCA Lutheran's towards Giertz as a theologian. And that is great because his stuff on the pastoral office is great.

I do have to admit though, that I encountered in this work in his section on the Lord's Supper another area where I strongly disagree with Giertz. He posits that "it does not really do much to preach about the sacrament" which I would greatly disagree with. Now a little later he does say "It certainly has great meaning to preach the Lord's Supper. It is particularly needed in some places to be said that Jesus 'receives sinners and eats with them.'" And to his credit, I understand the point he is making. He is arguing that the sacrament preaches far more in the act than in the sermon. "It is better to let them preach themselves, just as they do..." and "That which remains to be said concerning the Lord's Supper, it says better itself." And I agree with him here, in that the Sacraments carry their own unique giftedness towards proclaiming to the Christian and therefore its greatest effect is in the form and purpose for which Jesus gave it. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by this statement regarding not preaching the sacrament. Granted, perhaps the key word too is "about". Something in this section just did not sit right with me. There was, however, plenty of good material even here. I owe inspiration for my Maundy Thursday sermon to his material on 1 Cor 11:26 on p84. 

The second part of the book was in fact perhaps the best in terms of an avid reader of Giertz getting some material not abundant in his other available works: that would be his chapter on the inheritance from the Reformation. While this theology in general appears elsewhere, it is taken up here in much a more formal and complete form than one is likely to find anywhere else in his English works. His subsections deal with justification by faith, view of man, life in society, the freedom of the church, and evangelical freedom (as well in English the awakenings, but we will talk about that separately). These last three sections in particular are a real gift and very well laid out. Giertz demonstrates again his ability to capture the heart of these theological concepts. His work on vocation is phenomenal and really deserves credit. But there are few places where he takes it up with the same amount of material as he does here (I suspect Kyrkofromhet might include a significant portion towards this, but that is still in translation). The only place I can think of that rivals this section in the works of Giertz on vocation would be "What Is an Evangelical Lutheran Christian". We also see his concern for the relationship between the State and the Church in this section.

The last section regards the Awakenings, and here it is clear that Giertz felt more of a need to defend the importance of this moment in Swedish history towards the church's future. I'm curious if the term väckelse ("awakening") carried some wider baggage or connotations as it does in English (Erickson even has to give a footnote distinguishing these awakenings from the great awakenings in America). He puts forward four characteristics of awakening: 1) a sense that something must happen with man, 2) conversion is a work of God through the Word, 3) concern that faith must be true, and 4) emphasis on daily repentance. The second is perhaps the most important as he talks about the ordo salutis which I've talked about elsewhere as it becomes a central method of Giertz's theological application. 

It's worth also noting his conclusion chapter, since here we see Giertz's vision that the church hold fast to the message through these inheritances as she adapts to new situations and changing landscapes. He talks about the need for organizational restructuring (something he does oversee in his time as bishop and attests to in his essay "Kyrkan i smältdegeln"), and urban awakenings. He emphasizes that there is something similar in their content and yet this commitment to the past cannot be a reason to resist all adaptation. "We do not learn from the past in order to conserve what men thought and did. Human traditions may never be so dear to us. We can still dispense with them."

I'm probably never going to not recommend a Giertz book. But some deserve a stronger push than others towards our awareness and need to read it. This is one of those books. It comes with my highest recommendation. Biased though I am towards Giertz as a whole, it's hard to see how someone who desires the evangelical faith to flourish in the church today would not want to read or share this material.

This really is a message for the whole church. I'll close with a quote from his section on awakening:

This is the church's way. We know very well that faith is not true so long as there is a secret or open trust in our own merits. Now the church's task is to let the Word work a true faith. The disciples are all who hear the Word and receive it with sincere hearts. So, the church does not need to test the faith of an individual. She does not hold examinations of faith as a condition for access to her sanctuaries or the Lord's Supper. Everyone who wants to take the path of discipleship and follow his master to be instructed, he is welcome. Yet for all this, the church preaches seriously and penetratingly about sin and grace, about the heart's corruption and Christ's atonement, about the contrast between self-righteousness and God's righteousness. Then she crushes all false supports of faith and anchors faith where it shall be anchored, on Christ the rock. -p195